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Wednesday was the third day of the joint Keystone Symposia in Banff, Canada: (1) “Manipulation of the Gut Microbiota for Metabolic Health” and (2) “Microbiome, Host Resistance and Disease”, and the great talks kept on coming!

One track opened the day with a group of lectures on nutrition and gut microbiota. Jens Walter (a local, from University of Alberta) talked about modulation of the human gut microbiota with non-digestible carbohydrates—taking an ecological perspective. Then Nathalie Delzenne (Université catholique de Louvain) spoke about the links between prebiotics, gut microbiota, and human health, describing her intervention study on increasing inulin-rich vegetables in the diet. On the mechanism side, André Marette (Université Laval) described mouse work on the interaction between dietary polyphenols—for example, arctic fruit extracts—and the gut microbiota to alleviate obesity-related diseases. And regarding the early life period in humans, Maria Carmen Collado gave an apt overview of what we know about how the maternal microbiome (in breast milk especially) affects the infant gut microbiome and health. Meanwhile, in the other track, the account by Kerwyn Casey Huang (Stanford) of how the gut microbiota can be resilient to perturbations proved popular.

At 5:00 pm the action continued with a track on xenobiotics-microbiota interactions in metabolic diseases and another on disease tolerance, pathology, and the microbiome. In the latter, Yasmine Belkaid (NIAID, NIH) spoke about her extensive work on control of skin tissue immunity and repair by the microbiota, discussing how homeostatic immunity to the skin microbiota occurs through diverse mechanisms that may or may not involve inflammation. Janelle S. Ayres (Salk Institute) then talked about what she has learned about host-microbe interactions (and adaptations); she described her mouse model findings on how micronutrients—for example, iron—mediate healthy host-pathogen interactions.

Thursday will be the last day of these joint conferences! But don’t forget—you can still re-live the action on Twitter by searching the conference hashtags, #KSmicrobiome and #KSgut.